Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash

A pathbreaking work for the #MeToo era, laying out a better response to sexual harms that includes due process for the accused

In the past few years, an astonishing number of sexual harassment victims have come forward with their stories, demanding consequences for their assailants and broad societal change. Each prominent allegation, however, has also set off a wave of questions—some posed in good faith, some distinctly not—about the rights of the accused. As a result, the national conversation about the rights of victims and alleged abusers has grown unduly polarized, inflamed by a public narrative that wrongly presents feminism and fair process as warring interests.

Sexual Justice is an intervention, pointing the way to common ground. As civil rights attorney Alexandra Brodsky makes clear, smart procedures for addressing allegations can let schools and workplaces promote both equality and fairness for all. But, she warns us, we should be wary of the anti-feminist backlash, which hijacks the rhetoric of due process to obscure its true goals: protecting abusers and rolling back progress on sexual harassment.

Drawing on popular culture, notorious cases from the news, and the personal experiences of sexual assault survivors and advocates, Sexual Justice shows that fair process can—indeed, must—be a core part of the Me Too movement. Introducing the legal theories and forgotten histories that explain our current predicament, it illuminates the way to a more just world.